President-elect
Donald Trump at a press conference in
Manhattan.REUTERS/Shannon
Stapleton

President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday shut down a CNN
reporter who attempted to ask a question at Trump's first press
conference in months.

Speaking in Manhattan, the president-elect first blasted BuzzFeed
for its decision Tuesday to publish a memo containing unverified
claims that Trump both was compromised by and collaborated with
Russian intelligence agents who the memo said passed information
to his campaign, claims that Trump denied at Wednesday's news
conference.

Trump also blasted CNN, which on Tuesday was the first of
numerous news outlets to report that top US intelligence
officials presented Trump with a summary of the memo as part of a
briefing last week, though CNN did not publish the full memo as
BuzzFeed did.

"As far as BuzzFeed, which is a failing pile of garbage, writing
it, they're going to suffer the consequences, they already are,"
Trump said, before going off on a tangent defending his lawyer,
Michael Cohen, who was also named in the memo. "As far as CNN
going after their way to build it up — and by the way, we just
found out, Michael Cohen, who is a very talented lawyer, a good
lawyer at my firm. It was just reported that it wasn't this
Michael Cohen that we're talking about."

"I'm not going to give you a question. You're fake news," Trump
replied, only later taking a question from a different CNN
reporter.

CNN stood by its reporting.

Shortly after the news conference, CNN anchor Jake Tapper read a
statement from the network defending its story and distancing its
reporting from BuzzFeed's decision to publish the 35-page memo.

"CNN's decision to publish carefully sourced reporting about the
operations of our government is vastly different than BuzzFeed's
decision to publish unsubstantiated memos," the statement said.
"The Trump team knows this. They are using BuzzFeed's decision to
deflect from CNN's reporting, which has been matched by other
major news organizations.

"CNN made it clear that we are not publishing any details of the
35 page document because we have not corroborated the report's
allegations. Given that members of the Trump transition team have
so vocally criticized our reporting, we encourage them to
identify, specifically, what they believe to be inaccurate."